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Northern Inter Tribal Health Authority

Overview

In 1996, Lac La Ronge Indian Band, Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation, Prince Albert Grand Council and Meadow Lake Tribal Council, all successful groups providing different configurations of first and second level services, began planning for improvements in the third level services previously provided by Health Canada.

The partners developed the Northern Inter-Tribal Health Authority (NITHA), a mechanism to both provide third level services in order to strengthen governance, management and professional practices within the partnership as well as to influence health policy.

Working together since 1996, it is difficult to imagine life before NITHA. Like most longstanding relationships and partnerships, NITHA has become a vehicle of connecting, organizing and representing the work of the four partners in health. We are just beginning to see the spin-offs as the groups from northern alliances in sectors such as economic development and post secondary training.

NITHA, as an incorporated body, serves as a unique governance model that is assisting in the development of federal transfer policy and future self-government arrangements. The backdrop is the individual transfers which have served as a signpost for future development of health care delivery in Northern Saskatchewan.

The creativity, assertiveness and desire of each of the four groups in controlling their health service arrangements are the foundation for the third level transfer. The ability to work together to achieve the common good and the ability to assume very large management risks intrinsic to northern primary care service delivery particularly are remarkable. Translated, this means the ability to deal with health issues without the external assistance.

These experienced groups formed NITHA in order to achieve certain objectives, one of which was to address the shadow cast by financial sustainability issues for the first and second level configurations of service. The second was to build a seamless communicable disease control strategy. Third, was the desire to shape a third level support unit that was more relevant to the Partners.

NITHA and the individual transfers represent an enormous change in Aboriginal health. The work of the NITHA partners is critical to developing workable Aboriginal health policy.

NITHA is a "voice" and a credible organization that expresses the experience of people living in the north where access to care and well-being is so directly affected by policy. The challenge lying ahead is how to best integrate NITHA into both the federal and provincial decision-making processes so that northern health care is made even more relevant, accessible and better resourced.